Through strategic product outsourcing, manufacturers continue to drive more and more manufacturing and product content to vendors that specialize in certain technologies. This product outsourcing allows primary manufacturers to specialize in technologies that provide the most value added content to their customers. A manufactured assembly may consist of multiple levels of assemblies and part numbers produced by several vendors in the chain of producing the assembly. Further, due to errors in supply/demand planning, order skew, configuration variability, as well as product defects, a manufacturer may need to change or re-personalize many of the purchased assemblies. In order to re-personalize or re-configure the assemblies it is important for the manufacturer to know exactly the current state as well as the history of the assembly.
Manufacturers may require its vendors to create a hierarchal data structure of the assemblies and supply the data to the manufacturer. The data is typically placed in a database. The data can then be used to reconfigure the product assemblies and the database updated to reflect the reconfiguration. This solution is costly and the product identity of previous sub-assemblies can be lost due to product reconfiguration. If an item is returned to the original vendor, there may be no original part number identification on the assembly for the vendor to verify its own assembly, which may require the manufacturer to search its records to prove the vendor is the original manufacturer of the assembly.
RFID tags are commonly used in the manufacturing industry to track and identify goods throughout the manufacturing process and for shipment to customers. RFID tags are similarly used by the end retailers. However, when RFID tags have been utilized in the manufacturing process, they have been used to only record “point in time” data, or the current status of the assembly. FIG. 2 shows a data record 200 for a prior art RFID tag. The data record shows the current state of the assembly by showing the part number 210, serial number 220 and other content 230. The information stored on the typical RFID tag as shown in FIG. 2 does not record the historical activities performed on the assembly and hierarchal information of the assembly such as the changing part number. This additional information is typically supplied to the manufacturer in a database format from the various vendors as described above.
Without a way to manage the history of a manufactured assembly through the lifecycle of the assembly in a complex supply chain, manufacturers will continue to bear the high costs of maintaining data from multiple vendors and other costs associated with re-configuring product assemblies.